Man sentenced after plea in slaying of adoptive father

January 22, 2019

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man has been sentenced to decades in prison after pleading guilty to stabbing his adoptive father to death with a butter knife in the Philadelphia suburbs and taking out one of the 74-year-old victim’s eyeballs.

The (Pottstown) Mercury reports that 30-year-old Preston Alvin Lonnberg-Lane pleaded guilty Tuesday to third-degree murder in the March 27 slaying.

Montgomery County Judge Wendy Rothstein sentenced him to 20 to 40 years for what she called “a brutal, senseless murder.”

Prosecutors said Thomas lane was asleep when the defendant attacked him. He died two days later. Officers recovered his father’s eyeball from the floor.

Authorities said the defendant told detectives he committed the crime after snorting two bags of fentanyl. As he was escorted from the courtroom, he said to reporters “Don’t do drugs.”